By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Published: June 11, 2006
The New York Times
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As more facts come out about the Duke lacrosse scandal, it should prompt some deep reflection.
No, not just about racism and sexism, but also about the perniciousness of any kind of prejudice that reduces people — yes, even white jocks — to racial caricatures. This has not been the finest hour of either the news media or academia: too many rushed to make the Duke case part of the 300-year-old narrative of white men brutalizing black women. That narrative is real, but any incident needs to be examined on its own merits rather than simply glimpsed through the prisms of race and class.
Racism runs through American history — African-American men still risk arrest for the de facto offense of "being black near a crime scene." But the lesson of that wretched past should be to look beyond race and focus relentlessly on facts.
So let's look at facts. Time-stamped photos show the accuser dancing at a lacrosse team party at 12:04 a.m. and slumped outside the house where the party was taking place at 12:30 a.m., so the alleged beating, gang rape and sodomy would have had to occur during that interval. Stuart Taylor Jr., the legal writer once for this newspaper and now for National Journal, has noted that the later photo shows her looking relaxed, with her clothes in good order.
Mr. Taylor, who has covered this case meticulously, told me he was more than 90 percent confident that the defendants were innocent.
One of the defendants is Reade Seligmann, whose cellphone made at least seven calls between 12:05 and 12:14. The last was to a taxi driver, who picked up Mr. Seligmann at 12:19. That's a pretty good alibi.
Meanwhile, no DNA evidence has turned up to confirm that the accuser had any sex with the lacrosse players (she said no condoms were used). It also turns out that the accuser is herself a bundle of complexities: a Navy veteran and full-time university honor student but one who moonlights for an escort service, has a criminal record and in the past has accused three men of gang-raping her.
I've been poring over a half-dozen police reports and witness reports filed in court in dribs and drabs, the latest just a few days ago. The initial police report by Sgt. J. C. Shelton shows that the accuser didn't raise the issue of rape until she was about to be locked up in a mental health center. Then when she said she had been raped, she was transported instead to a hospital, where the same police report says she recanted the rape charge, and finally reinstated it.
A different report by a police investigator says that the other dancer at the party initially scoffed that the allegation of rape was a "crock."
Granted, traumatized victims and witnesses can be terrified and confused. We don't know what happened, and we should avoid stereotyping the accuser because of her job — but we should also avoid stereotypes of lacrosse players as "hooligans."
That's what the district attorney, Mike Nifong, called the Duke athletes. As I see it, he may be the real culprit here. For starters, his many public statements seem to violate the North Carolina rules of professional conduct; Section 3.8f bars prosecutors from "making extrajudicial comments that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public condemnation of the accused."
Mr. Nifong may have had a motive for prosecuting a case that wouldn't otherwise merit it: using it as a campaign tool. Heavily outspent in a tough three-way election race, he was the lone white man on the ballot, and he needed both media attention and black votes to win. In the end, he got twice as many black votes as his closest opponent, and that put him over the top.
Unfortunately, many in the commentariat started by assuming that the lacrosse players were thugs. Prof. Houston Baker, who is now leaving Duke, demanded that the university dismiss the coaches and players as a response to "abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed among us."
Look, we have a shameful history in this country of racial prejudice. One of the low points came in the 1930's when the Scottsboro Boys were pulled off a train in Alabama and charged with rape because of the lies of two white women. The crowds and media began a witch hunt (one headline: "Nine Black Fiends Committed Revolting Crime") because they could not see past the teenagers' skin color.
So let's take a deep breath and step back. Black hobos shouldn't have been stereotyped then, and neither should white jocks today.
Duke Reinstates Men's Lacrosse, With Warning That Party's Over
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DURHAM, N.C., June 5 — After two months in limbo, the Duke University men's lacrosse team was given a second chance Monday.
Education editor Alison Mitchell is answering reader questions this week.
The Duke president, Richard H. Brodhead, who in April canceled the team's season after a woman accused three players of rape, said the men's lacrosse team would be reinstated, with strict stipulations.
The team, one of the best in the nation, will be monitored more closely by administrators and play under a new code of conduct written by the players, Brodhead said in a news conference.
"I am, I know, taking something of a risk in reinstating men's lacrosse," Brodhead said. "The reinstatement is inevitably probationary. If we begin to see patterns of irresponsible individual or team behaviors familiar from the past, the athletics director and I will have no choice but to revisit this decision."
Three Duke lacrosse players were charged with raping a local woman during a party March 13. They have denied the charges. The rest of the team was all but cleared by Michael B. Nifong, the Durham County district attorney. A faculty committee had recommended that the team be reinstated.
Brodhead said he made his decision about the team Saturday, after the players pledged to follow the new standards.
A university investigation found that the team had "established a pattern of irresponsible behavior, much of it aggravated by drink," Brodhead said.
Violations of the team's new code of conduct include underage drinking, disorderly conduct and harassment. The penalties for breaking the rules are counseling and community service for a first offense, a three-game suspension for a second offense and a season-long suspension for a third offense.
"If we did not allow these players the chance to take responsibility to make a new history for their sport at Duke, we would be denying another fundamental value, namely the belief in the possibility of learning through experience, the belief in education itself," Brodhead said.
The Duke athletic director, Joe Alleva, said none of the team's current players had transferred to other universities, which "sends a strong statement for their commitment to rebuilding this program." Alleva also acknowledged that three of the team's nine incoming freshmen recruits had chosen to go elsewhere.
The sports information director, Art Chase, said those players were Scott Kocis of Huntington, N.Y., who will join Georgetown; Tom Dodge of Manhasset, N.Y., who will go to Penn; and Ken Clausen of Downingtown, Pa., who will attend Virginia.
And others may join them. Craig Dowd, a recruit from East Northport, N.Y., has not decided whether he will play at Duke, his mother, Patricia Dowd, said. He is the younger brother of Kyle Dowd, who played at Duke this season and graduated last month.
"We're still working through all the emotional issues after what happened, and there's been no relief," Patricia Dowd said. "It's been a very difficult time, and there will be no relief until those three boys are exonerated. We still don't know what we're going to do."
Kevin Cassese, 25, a United States national team player and a former Duke lacrosse captain, was named the interim coach at Duke while the university searches for a new head coach. He was an assistant under Mike Pressler, who resigned April 5.
Pressler, who was at Duke for 16 seasons, will not be considered for the position. Although there was no evidence that Pressler knew about the party at the center of the scandal, Brodhead said, the university wanted to start the program anew.
A woman hired to dance at the party said that three lacrosse players raped and assaulted her. In April, the sophomores Collin Finnerty of Garden City, N.Y., and Reade Seligmann of Essex Fells, N.J., were charged with first-degree forcible rape, first-degree sexual offense and kidnapping. Last month, a team co-captain, David Evans of Bethesda, Md., was charged with the same offenses.
Another team member, Matthew Wilson, was charged with driving while intoxicated in Chapel Hill, N.C., on May 24. His blood alcohol content was 0.21, nearly three times the limit of 0.08 in North Carolina, according to the police. He was also charged with misdemeanor possession of marijuana and misdemeanor possession of drug paraphernalia.
Alleva said Wilson, from Durham, was suspended from the team last week. But the charge, which came at a crucial time in the lacrosse program's future, did not change Brodhead's mind about letting the team play.
"I was very disappointed, you can imagine," Brodhead said. "I did not, at the end, feel it was right to hold the whole program hostage to the behavior of any single player."
At Duke, a Scandal In Search of Meaning
By Anne Applebaum
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Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Just like everybody else, apparently, I've followed the twists and turns of the Duke lacrosse team scandal with rapt attention. The exotic dancer's charge that several team members raped and abused her; the subsequent discovery of time-stamped photographs allegedly showing she was abused before she arrived; the testimony of the security guard; the shifting claims of the other dancer; the mixed DNA evidence; the district attorney running for reelection; the criminal records of both the alleged victim and the alleged perpetrators; the angry black community in Durham; and the presumably angry, presumably white, online community that has already made "Duke Lacrosse" T-shirts a best-selling item on eBay and elsewhere.
But -- just like everybody else -- I've found that every shift and change in the story, or, rather, every shift and change in what the public is told about the story, have also led me to draw different conclusions about what it all means . At different times over the past few weeks this story has looked like the War Against Boys made real: innocent young men being lynched for the sake of a DA's reelection campaign! At other moments, it has looked like a dark, porn-and-alcohol-laced saga of the Corrupt Youth of Today: Back in the day we had keg parties, not strippers! At still other times, it seemed an even darker tale of Old Racism in the Old South. Or New Racism in the New South. Or some combination thereof.
It seems I'm not alone in this pursuit of deeper meaning. A quick trawl of the airwaves and the Internet produces one columnist who sees in this story a moral about the disappearance of chivalry and honor among boys in contemporary America; another who sees in the same story a moral about the disappearance of modesty and caution among girls in contemporary America; and several others who believe, one way or another, that all of this has something to do with President Bill Clinton. Within just a few weeks the case has become -- as another writer has already put it -- "an ink-blot test, not a legal proceeding." The right sees the story it wants to see, the left sees the story it wants to see, Jesse Jackson sees the story he wants to see and Rush Limbaugh sees the story he wants to see.
I suppose this rush to judgment, absent the facts, is deplorable, and indeed many are already deploring it. Or deploring the media that are paying too much attention to it and twisting the evidence and ignoring the truth for their own reasons and so on. But I've also come to the conclusion that these periodic national moments of intense obsession with hyped-up criminal cases and celebrity trials are somehow necessary in this country, and the media haven't invented that need out of whole cloth.
In June 1994, after O.J. Simpson's wife was found murdered and Simpson tried to run from the law in his Ford Bronco, followed by police cars, helicopters and reporters from nearly every television station in the country, I sat up most of the night with a group of friends arguing about the case: whether an innocent man would ever try to escape and whether, having made such an attempt, he could ever get a fair trial, particularly given that he was black and his murdered wife was white -- and this was before the trial had begun.
The rest is history. Our argument became a national argument. The trial was not only televised, it was also covered by 2,000 reporters. It produced dozens of books and made celebrities out of the prosecutors, the defense lawyers and the judge. Some 90 percent of Americans said they had seen part of it. About 142 million people are thought to have watched or listened as the verdict was delivered. Not since January 1953, when 71 percent of television-watching Americans saw Lucy Ricardo bring a baby home from the hospital (more than had watched President Eisenhower's inauguration), had there been an event that so many Americans could discuss so easily in bars, coffee shops or supermarkets with so many other Americans on the following day.
Which is the point, of course. Particularly now that there is no more "I Love Lucy" -- and very little of anything that everyone watches at the same time and can discuss around the water cooler on the following day -- the O.J. Simpson trial and the Duke lacrosse case, truly horrible though they are, serve that function. They contain elements that everyone can relate to, black or white, rich or poor, male or female. They involve sports. They involve sex. At the deepest level, they involve human evil -- murder, rape, jealousy and pride. No wonder so many people are trying to figure out what it all means
Keeping the Duke Scandal in Context
Tuesday, May 2, 2006
Both Anne Applebaum ["At Duke, a Scandal in Search of Meaning," op-ed, April 26] and Eugene Robinson ["Tough Questions in Durham," op-ed, April 25] made excellent points in their opinion pieces about the Duke lacrosse team fiasco.
On one count, however, both were off the mark: This situation has nothing to do with Southern culture. While Duke University is in North Carolina, only the accuser is local. The alleged attackers come from the Northeast.
With so much emphasis placed upon the South's admittedly horrific history of racism, it is too easy to forget that the last and arguably bloodiest school desegregation case took place in Boston, not Birmingham. Problems of race, class and misogyny plague the country, not just the South.
TARA MOORE SKELTON
Silver Spring
Eugene Robinson said he is "not blaming the victim" when he wrote that the woman who reported being assaulted at the Duke University lacrosse team's party should have made "better choices" about earning money than to be an exotic dancer. I disagree. He was blaming her. Her work choices should not be an issue, just whether a crime occurred.
Mr. Robinson said he's trying to put the incident in context. But why does he stress Duke's outreach effort and not the economic realities of some women? I know women who chose stripping as a job in college because it had all the advantages that most work available to young women does not have: flexible hours, high wages and some opportunity for self-expression.
Risky, yes. But so is working at bars with drunks, managing picky customers in retail and dodging lecherous bosses in low-wage office jobs.
For a single mother who needs to support her family and try to finish college, stripping might have been the right choice.
LUCY BARBER
Washington
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Eugene Robinson's column was full of unsubstantiated and insulting generalizations about Duke presented under the guise of a "rich historical context."
The allegations facing members of the lacrosse team are serious. If true, several are guilty of a despicable crime, but let us not condemn anyone until the legal process has run its course. And, certainly, let us not condemn a student body guilty of nothing more than working hard at one of the most challenging educational institutions in the nation.
As an alumnus and former teacher at Duke, I found Mr. Robinson's caricature of the university laughable. While a graduate student there, I taught some of the brightest, most motivated and idealistic undergraduates I have ever met, hardly students who were "downright arrogant in their sense of superiority."
To get a real sense of the character of this "elite university in the once-segregated South," perhaps Mr. Robinson should take a class there. No doubt, he would benefit from the $21,592 a year in grant money that the average student receives.
MICHAEL E.S. HOFFMAN
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